Employees of a business generate large numbers of internally directed electronic messages, often including attachments or links to web pages. Processing all of these messages takes a significant amount of employee time and therefore company resources (and in addition requires use of other resources, such as network bandwidth, processing capabilities, messaging system infrastructure, etc.). Each email (and in some cases, the associated attachment, which may include a document or voice message) must be read, assessed, prioritized, and in some cases responded to or disposed of, etc. Some emails may be ignored or left for considering at a later time, but others may be forwarded, replied to, deleted, archived, etc. within a relatively short timeframe, particularly if they relate to a single “conversation”. If an email arrives while the employee is engaged in work, then the interruption may slow the employee down regardless of whether or not the email is important, or even relevant to the employee's job or current task. Further, a significant percentage of received messages may be misdirected, ill-conceived, unnecessary, or otherwise inappropriate, which results in a misuse of company resources.
Many companies simply ignore the problems created by the non-productive processing of email or other messages because of the lack of a good solution, while others implement static rules like address or title filters that block messages based on pre-defined criteria. For example, members of a company's sales team with technical questions may attempt to contact the company's Engineering Department, instead of more appropriately addressing their inquiries to the Product Support team. In response to such messaging efforts, a company may employ a static email filter rule based on the source and destination email addresses that blocks (or redirects) email sent from Sales Team members to Engineering. The preceding example operates like a simple “spam filter,” and, just like spam filters can sometimes register ‘false-positives’ by identifying legitimate email as inappropriate. For example, such a static rule can cast too wide a net and end up deleting (or failing to deliver) emails between Sales and Engineering staff that were not of a sales nature and should have been delivered to the intended recipient.
Such static message filtering rules are frequently defined by people outside of the scope of the actual business dynamics or operations involved in the messaging, such as by executives within a company's corporate structure or by people (such as those in the Information Technology (IT) Department) who are not directly involved in those dynamics or operations. Thus, such static rules are typically not optimal for accomplishing their purpose, nor are they easily adapted to complex and changing company policies or changing business processes. As a result, such static rules may either overly restrict communications in an attempt to be effective, or inadequately filter unwanted messages (for instance, because of a desire to prevent or reduce the blocking of messages that turn out to be “false-positives”).
For example, if a company wants to restrict email communications along its organizational line of command, then the IT department might define a set of static rules based on the company's organizational structure. However, even if the initially defined rule set was effective, such organizational structures are dynamic and may change frequently (where some changes may be documented and others more informal in nature). As a result, it would likely be tedious and inefficient for the IT department to have to monitor changes to the company's structure in real-time and update the rule set accordingly as lines of responsibility and project teams change.
While existing data processing platforms and systems can provide business users with many useful functional and data processing capabilities, they do not provide a solution to the problem of employees spending time on the excessive and unproductive processing of emails and other forms of messaging. Similarly, conventional data processing, computing, and related systems or platforms do not provide sufficient tools to enable system administrators and management to effectively reduce the amount of unproductive time and other resources spent processing emails and other forms of messaging. Embodiments of the invention address this need both individually and collectively.